The Coast of Everything

by Guillermo Stitch

To find the center, begin at the edge . . .

A daughter's devotion parts her from her father. A dutiful soldier sentences his daughter to a loveless exile and her mother to madness. With her last breath a dying woman exhales the whole world. A young girl with a broken body holds it up.

Their nested stories bleed into one another, tributaries in search of a common sea; parched souls in search of an oasis; ink racing through blotting paper.

A book with no ending and endless beginnings, The Coast of Everything - the long-awaited second novel from the author of Lake of Urine -is an astonishing masterpiece, epic, unfurling, baffling and beguiling. A gumshoe noir, a space opera; a multiverse melodrama, an adventure; a leap of faith, a call to prayer and a call to arms. It is a notification of our first duty wherever our humanity is threatened: to persist.

Includes two free recipes.

Genres: Literary Fiction, Novels, Fiction

760 pages, Paperback

Published June 16, 2026

About the author

Guillermo Stitch is the author of the novella "Literature™", which won gold at the 2019 INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER (IPPY) Awards, and the novels "Lake of Urine" and "The Coast of Everything". He is Executive Editor at Exacting Clam.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went to a book launch for this in a pub in London a couple of weeks ago. The author interviewed the interviewer ('What's my book about?', 'What's next for me after this book?'), C.D. Rose then did a very amusing rambling observations, ending with absurd questions (one big monologue talking about various different writer types - writer's writer, writer's writer's writer, and other bits I can't remember - and then ending with 'What about you - are you Rod or Emu?'). There was the most delightfully unintentionally disorganised raffle for a few prizes - with the first ten or so winning tickets (and a few after that) being for numbers that hadn't been given out to anyone in the audience. Someone did some stand-up comedy. and there were a couple of readings from the book from another author (and Guillermo read a recipe from the book) to add a bit of normality to the evening. I wish more book events were like this.

It seemed a befitting event for this sprawl of a book. I'd recently read and loved his previous novel, The Lake Of Urine, and was expecting this to be an absurd and funny book also, but the humour (whilst still present) mostly takes more of a backseat this time - other than with the introduction of a well known author in the third (second?) story, which had me laughing quite a bit. The book is made up of separate stories/novels nested into the previous one, but each also having their own diversions and additional stories within. Lots of recurring themes/plots about stories and fiction being banished in these different worlds/times (whether real or imagined, past or future), and so I guess the book could be a kind of mix of Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I particularly loved The Tale Of The Isle Of Truth and the isolated small setting that the characters are live in / are trapped in. The only downside is that this book could be at least three different novels (which would help with my ever important Goodreads book reading tally of course), and could then give me the opportunity to live in each world a bit longer, but there's good reason(s) for them to all be one part of the same giant doorstop of a book.

I would like to say that it's my favourite of the 80 or so books I've read this year so far, but that number one spot goes to Danielewski's Tom's Crossing - another even bigger novel. I guess I can just be thankful that that book wasn't included as one of the nested stories within The Coast Of Everything!

[John Higgins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some quotes from The Coast of Everything.

“Brazen hintery.” Page 652

“One should never make assumptions when it comes to colour splash.” Page 402

“I don’t need to get into any kind of…villainy.” Page 393

“Even sitting on the floor of this Tetris canyon was vertiginous.” Page 349

“Not everything in the following chapters will be revealed to you. Somethings you will see and understand – some things you will see and not understand. And some things you will not see. I need you to be okay with that.” Page 333

“The arrival of writers was where the rot set in.” page 305

“Does such loose talk redound to our behoof?” page 216

“You don’t smoke? What the fuck is the matter with you?” page 40

Most of those quotes come from The Tale of Three Voyages, the lengthy central section of Guillermo Stitch’s hallucinatory big beast of a book, which I’ve been lucky enough to read in manuscript form, ahead of publication.

This part of the book details the slow disintegration of Liam Tead (pronounced Tead), an Irish insurance clerk-cum-Marlowesque Californian private eye. In keeping with most rough diamond cinematic loners – Liam is far more the Elliott Gould Marlowe than the Bogart one – he is an exemplary cook; you can easily imagine him shaving a truffle with a razorblade – and lives in a world of blistered white paint and endless blue skies. I see a perfect white espresso cup pressed against the brick red of a stubbly Irish chin, like an inverted Japanese flag. Liam’s waning inheritance allows him to cosplay a cinematic Shamus, despite his being shit at it.

The worst thing that could happen happens: Liam gets a client. A proper client. A stupendously rich client. A client who, disastrously, has faith in him. Her faith will uproot him, send him across oceans and deserts, into the clutches of cartoon mayors, beautiful incestuous twins, a philosophical djinn who will explain everything over a half coconut of wine, beautiful women who beat and pet dogs that are also beautiful women, a flight with a Roc, and the story of the world’s most famous sisters, at least one of whom is a genetically enhanced super-magician. Almost from the beginning Liam hates all of it. It’s the most human – certainly the sort of human I am – response to the spiralling horrors of an action movie I’ve ever read. Liam is not a man to land a crashing plane. He’s unlikely to take to the airducts of Nakatomi Plaza in his bare feet. He has no faith in himself and cannot believe anyone else could have any in him. He knows who he is. He knows what he’s done. But Liam’s spinelessness, his craven selfishness and the useless guilt he carries with him, is his secret power. It will save his life at least once. And he is intuitive. His client is right to have faith in him – he witlessly, and with great cost to himself, gets the job done.

These stories, and there many stories, each bleeding into another, tributaries searching for the sea, feature desperate, out-of-their-depth men, pitted against unknowable Dystopian forces: Billy Stringer takes on the oppressive monetized philistinism of Gripping Tails: a company that has, at last, found a use for literature, for art: you can use it to power an automobile!

Billy’s friend and bookdealer, in a new sense, initially an asshole younger brother, becomes fastidious and a booze connoisseur, confronting the greedy and selfish nature of writers by having to share a flat with the ghost of Dickens. If there were ever a portrait of the author committed to these pages…

In The Tale of the Isle of Truth, we glide in on the back of an albatross, a potent harbinger of what’s to come for a small island community abandoned by the distant and tyrannical Magistracy, embodied by one Jasper Fafl – whose monomaniacal stream of consciousness we are privy to – and whose intergenerational lust poisons his community like hexafluosilicic acid, particularly the women in Arenaceous Nell’s life: his wife Izzy and his daughter, Lil. In a textbook Stitch move, Izzy’s sister, who disapproves of Arenaceous, is never named, though there are times the text is screaming for her to be!

I found this part of the book especially moving. It had weight and the balance, the linguistic tumult and the emotional heft of Garcia Marquez. I cried for these characters and, worse, I liked them. The drunken genius, the steadfast, heretical best friend, the brave, stoic Lil, strong, stuttering Simon, the awful Cyres, Heft and fucking Pack. The pantomimic horror of Jasper Fafl, with his bad teeth and rubbing hands, and whom I can only picture as the actor Jiri Prymek. This story is, perhaps, the central text, containing as it does a story within a story – the Archival Survey Reviews – assiduously prepared by Lil and later Simon, which tell the story of the Magistracy’s attempt to rob the people of Sinn of their fictions while sitting at the fundament of all fiction: the Stone, the gateway to paradise. The story that starts all stories.

But, of course, all the stories contain stories. And those stories contain stories. The Tarot deck is shuffled again, the spread revealing fresh combinations, more fools and hierophants and lovers and worlds, in relentless cartomantic profusion.

This is a huge novel. It’s also three novels. It may be as many as seven novels, depending on how you look at it. But it is definitely also a single novel – e pluribus unum – and I’m staggered by the way Stitch has corralled it, has allowed ideas and images to melt into one another: the Wahrberg becomes the Warburg, Frau Pfafl somehow linked to Jasper Fafl. All the Lils, the Litas, the Lias. The succession of strong men: Darius and Alphonse, all extrapolated from solid, silent Rolf. All the fairy tale props, the references to The Tinderbox, the allusions to the Tales from One Thousand and One Nights I don’t get, (because I’ve never read it) all the horror and the beauty, the satire and the substance, and the crippled girl lying on her train, the real Scheherazade, spinning the story, and the mad magician tearing down the trompe l’oeil castle, denying our heroine her ceiling – her little sky – as the real sky, infinite and unknowable, kills her muse.

The Coast of Everything is a book about the death of books and the unkillable nature of stories. It’s also a book about freedom and faith. In people, in fictions. No gods need apply. “How plausible faith becomes when nothing else is available.”

This book is an extraordinary achievement. He did it. He pulled it off. It’s epic, sprawling, baffling and beguiling. But the strings are pulled taut, measuring the horror against the beauty. This book made a grown man cry and laugh and really want to visit Tangiers.

Going in, I imagined the key quotation was: “Not everything in the following chapters will be revealed to you. Somethings you will see and understand – some things you will see and not understand. And some things you will not see. I need you to be okay with that.”

Having put the book down – and exhaled - I feel like Liam, looking on in wonder. Looking up.

“Even sitting on the floor of this Tetris canyon was vertiginous.”

Dizzying.

[Mairead Hearne (swirlandthread.com) · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Coast of Everything by Irish writer Guillermo Stitch published June 16th with Sagging Meniscus Press. It is described as ‘a decade in the making, the much anticipated follow-up to Guillermo Stitch’s debut novel, Lake of Urine.’ Stitch is the executive editor of Exacting Clam, the quarterly sister publication of Sagging Meniscus.

Matryoshka dolls and James Joyce were the two thoughts that entered my head as I got deeper and deeper into this very alternative novel, one that, I must admit, was a little beyond my comfort zone. The Coast of Everything is an extraordinary piece of work wrapped around a series of nesting stories. Incorporating multiple genres, with even a cameo from Charles Dickens in one story, Stitch is a writer not afraid to take risks, jumping from the whimsical to the chaotic. Quirky, surreal, fanciful, with a definite leaning toward the avant-garde, The Coast of Everything is a very unique reading experience, an immense work of creativity and imagination, a novel that demands more from the reader.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable book. A mix of styles and genres and interlocking stories, it never flags. Like many readers in the digital age, my attention span is not what it used to be--but this novel proves that an long, immersive, satisfying read is still possible.

The story mixes detective fiction with dystopia and science fiction, and moves from the mountains of Europe to an imaginary island to night clubs in Tangier, among other settings. The shifting narratives are full of humor and pathos, and, as the book progresses, suspense.

The Coast of Everything is an ambitious novel, rich in allusion but not cloying or smarter-than-thou. Highly recommended.

[Ronald P · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Coast of Everything is a great book, but like many great books, it is not an easy book. It demands great readers who will invest the necessary time and effort to appreciate its richness. It is not a novel but three novels and a long short story stored inside each other like hollow Russian wooden dolls, and at its center, not a tiny solid doll, but... well... the Coast of Everything.

The first dystopian novel is set in the future, where books have been banned. Not some books, but all fiction. Then Charles Dickens appears. It's not clear if Dickens is a figment of a character's imagination or is some sort of AI simulacrum, or a ghost. But Dickens sits down and writes a story.

Which launches us into the next novel. This is a three stage rocket. Science fiction written in Dickensian prose. Not an easy task, but Stitch pulls it off, partly because it's more about people than science. This is far far future, when humans have colonized or invaded other planets, in an even worse totalitarianism called the Magistracy.

This novel seems to burn out on a gloomy note, but the third stage ignites and suddenly we're in present day San Diego, with an Irishman, Liam, a perpetual loser, trying to be a private detective without any talent or experience other than being a fan of Raymond Chandler. Almost by accident, he's hired by Sherry Zade, the heiress of the media giant fortune, a company that basically runs the world, and its symbol will become that of the Magistracy.

Sherry wants him to find her twin sister Doonah, and Liam is instantly out of his depth, ending up on a container ship, then in Tangier, then an oasis in Libya, and finally in Cairo in a series of alcohol-infused drug-crazed escapades and with some steamy sex thrown in for good measure. At one point it's suggested, and Liam fears, the whole story is a delusion and he is a schizophrenic, but it does come back to reality and ends more or less happily, with a bizarre twist.

Now the other halves of the nested dolls can be put back together. The far future story ends, more or less happily. The nearer future story ends. Even the beginning story ends, the shortest of them all. One wakes up, realizes that this was a tale told, not by an idiot, but by Scheherazade.

As for style and content, Stitch is gifted with a rare talent to explore emotional depth and psychological aberration seldom found in literary fiction, let alone genre writing. But this is neither, or both. Liam, arguably his best character, is full of self-doubt which descends into self-loathing. We think of Kafka, and Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground. Liam is his own antagonist. That everything turns out right in the end is lovely Irish optimism, the pot of gold at the end of the black and white rainbow.

So this is a book warning us of a possible future. We've all seen the signs. But it's much more than 1984 or Brave New World. It's about the vulnerability in our own minds to want and create that future.

Now what is, “The Coast of Everything?” A couple of the characters use the sentence and try to explain it. For me, it relates to what several of Stitch's characters see when they focus on a small area of their vision. They see more of the same pattern, smaller and smaller, endlessly. Shades of the Mandelbrot set, which resembles a coastline, but when you zoom into it, you see more and more coastline, but it never repeats itself. It looks like a solid object but it's all coastline, only coastline. What is reality? The coast of everything.

[L.V. Madsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very occasionally a novel comes your way that leaves you bedazzled, deeply satisfied yet full of questions, followed by an overwhelming urge to read it again. Such is the effect that The Coast of Everything had on me. This novel of complex and very different interconnected stories that beget more stories, is not one to be read in a rush. Like a rich and varied banquet, it needs to be sampled and savoured slowly and attentively so that all its different prose favours, strands, genres and characters can be appreciated. Its 747 pages make for a hefty tome and it is an unashamedly demanding read, requiring full concentration, but the reward is an immersion in the weird, magical, dystopian world of the author's eccentric imagination. In a world where our attention span has been fragmented and emojified, this will be a tall order for many. The stories of varying length that make up The Coast of Everything, each one in a different genre, tease you along, inviting you to figure out what drives the various characters in their seemingly bizarre quests and figure out which strands are interconnected. No summary can do them justice, as everything hinges on detail and complexity, but there are certain themes that stand out. There is an atmosphere of melancholy and loss which permeates everything, and alcohol plays a large part, along with mind-altering drugs. The novel is dedicated To Dad, a great irony, given that the dads that feature are either absent, feckless or downright cruel, with the women faring rather better, even if two of them are one-eyed geniuses trapped in crippled bodies. Literature itself is at risk here, something subversive that needs to be cut down to size and exploited for commercial use or else hunted down and destroyed by shady Orwellian entities who seek total thought control. But the dystopian nature of the novel is leavened with black humour, puns and mad adventure. These are great stories well told, something people have enjoyed since the days of Gilgamesh and Homer. I don't think I will ever 'get' it all, but that elusiveness is part of the spell. A cryptic poem precedes the first story, which in essence sums up the whole book for me. You may never get to the bottom of it all but you can enjoy the wild ride.

[Marc Faoite · Rating 5 out of 5]

What the Dickens?

Having few, if indeed any, natural talents, and those I may modestly lay claim to being almost entirely dormant, underdeveloped, unmonetized, indeed likely unmonetizable, I revel vicariously in the talents of others.

I recently watched a video of a woman in China renovating a reasonably generously proportioned one-room apartment. I’m the kind of chap who can’t drive a nail without hitting my thumb, a state of perennial clumsiness that leaves me all the more in admiration of those that not only can, but do. I revelled in this multi-talented woman casually displaying her skills in the dark arts of welding, carpentry, masonry, plastering, electricity, and painting, and gasped at her feats of strength involving sacks of cement and bundles of iron rebar.

To set the scene, the room in question was already structurally sound. A lick of paint and some improved flooring would have been more than adequate to make the space more habitable. But this woman had other ideas, creative artistic ideas, that when translated into action ensured the end result would be all but irreplicable. She gleefully went out of her way to make things both complex and chaotic, arriving at a result that was, shall we say (yes, we shall) artistically cohesive, while not exactly ensuring that the end product might boast mass appeal.

The room was now transformed into a split-level cave dwelling, entirely devoid of right angles. She built a mezzanine out of reinforced concrete and made that cave-like too, the sleeping area being the rear of this secondary upper cave, sheltered, yes, but unprotected from a two-metre drop to the floor.

But this was meant to be a book review.

I often juggle books –figuratively, obviously, due to my innate clumsiness established above - usually having several on the go at the same time. But once I started Guillermo Stitch’s latest novel, The Coast of Everything, I set aside all my ongoing reads and settled in for the long haul.

I say long haul, but it took me little more than a fortnight, but I say it all the same, because the first thing the reader will notice about this book is its heft and length.

I laugh in the face of heft. It is no obstacle to me, because I read on an e-reader (no, not one sold by the megalomaniac penis-rocket billionaire). As for length, well they say that doesn’t matter, it’s what you do with it that counts. And make no mistake, Stitch does many, many things throughout this poly-novel - which admittedly might not be a real word, but if it were would certainly hold currency here.

I rarely read reviews before reading a book, and try to keep my own waffling reviews largely spoiler-free. I tend to rely on serendipity and recommendations from people I have come to regard as reliable sources, so when I saw several consecutive mentions of The Coast of Everything online by individuals who fall into that category, I decided to take the plunge.

This is more a collection of shortish novels, or longish-novellas than a collection of short stories, and while this is only a partial and largely inaccurate characterisation, it gives some idea of the overall structure. The author himself references Sherazade’s multi-episodical death-avoiding tales, and there are definitely parallels. Different sections of the novel take place in very different times and locations, with different characters and connections that at first seem tenuous, if not entirely invisible. One section, for example, set in a dystopian future, features an almost permanently sozzled zombie version of Charles Dickens.

Yet as the reader ventures deeper, peeling through the onion layers, they may discover threads running through these separate narratives - if indeed they are to be considered separate, something their individual length may certainly allow. Themes of isolation, rejection, and inadequacy are perhaps the most obvious ones. Family is another, the difficulty of being a parent, the difficulty of being someone’s child.

This is an ambitious novel, mainly due to its unusual length and the nesting structure that cradles each tale, however loosely, within the other.

Like the Chinese DIY woman’s apartment renovation, the writer could have made things easier, simpler, both for himself and the reader, but the end result is nothing if not unique. There is no doubting Stitch’s skills as a writer. Each section carries a unique voice that allows him to display some of the extent of his considerable talent.

Perhaps Stitch, in the voice of one of his characters, gives a description of what some readers might feel at times while wandering through this labyrinthine work:

“It was … not what I expected. It seemed he had long since taken his enquiry beyond the confines of known theory, the language he used entirely decoupled from any concrete reference points that I might have begun with … But here, language itself was the currency.”

This is not a writer who does things the easy way, and while the entire novel is very readable, that doesn’t mean it is always an easy read, partially because the reader is kept in the dark as to what exactly is going on. There are hidden and unseen forces at work in almost every story here, many of them malevolent in ways that haunt and spur the protagonists.

Towards the latter part of the book the earlier narratives are revisited. Rediscovering one section, I was genuinely surprised to discover that it was part of the same book, and not another story from another book I had read in the recent past. Doors – literal doors within the stories - are locked and knocked upon, unlocked, broken down, or cut through. One door is opened in a particularly gruesome manner. These doorways allow the reader a short cut back out of the labyrinth.

“What of any value could you hope to find in these fictions? Wherefore place your faith in them? Are they not trinkets? Cheap baubles? Dirt on a lens?” asks one character.

In a climactic scene the artistic backdrop is torn away. Structures physically collapse under the forces exerted upon them by reality.

There is a lot of humour throughout the book, some of it absurd, some of it for German speakers, like the small town called Einpferd, literally one-horse, or a mountain called the Drei Schwestern (that borders Austria and Lichtenstein) that is also a wink at the three sisters who feature in a different section (and perhaps a nod to Chekhov too) - The Tale of the Three Voyages.

This would be my favourite narrative here if I were to choose. I suspect it is one that bears some significance for the writer, since the name of the main character - Liam Téad - is not far removed from the writer’s own moniker, Liam and Guillermo both being cognates of the English name William, while téad, in Irish, as best I understand it, means a rope, a cord, a string, a line, something that can link or bind one thing to another, or hold them together. Not quite a Stitch, but a close cousin thereof.

As I was nearing the end of this book, I came across another video.

This one featured mathematician and polymath, Hannah Fry, explaining the basics of battery chemistry through a demonstration in which she alternately piles copper coins, zinc-plated washers, and little pieces of cardboard soaked in brine, atop one another. She finally connects both ends to a light-emitting diode to show the electric current thereby produced.

It’s as good as analogy as any for what Guillermo Stitch has done in The Coast of Everything– layering different materials then linking both ends to create a charge.

Or to come at it from a different direction, let’s end with another quote from the book:
“To find the centre, begin at the edge”.

[P.J. Blumenthal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can a book really broach the coast of everything?

Where to begin? No, not my question. I’m imagining the author’s thoughts when first tackling a project with an ambitious title like “The Coast of Everything”. When I began reading Guillermo Stitch’s impressive new work, I was especially curious whether he could possibly manage to satisfy the claim of the title. Well, the answer in brief is: yes, he does.

Readers of this 760 page book quickly discover that they have embarked on a long journey into the heart of Storyland. How shall I put it? The storyline is like a cut diamond, faceted and complex. In no time, the storyteller-in-chief, i.e. the author, has passed on the narrative responsibility to a one-eyed paraplegic girl who, while being carried up a mountain trail, entertains her stretcher-bearers with a sweeping tale of a dystopic future world peopled by a cast of characters who quickly come into sharp focus. Among them, the ghost of Charles Dickens who just happens to be couch-surfing in the small apartment of another cast member. And pretty soon we are reading a brand-new novel by this otherworldly visitor – more precisely: an unsettling vision of a world even more dystopic than that related by the one-eyed paraplegic Homer of the opening chapters of the book.

Ultimately, the reader has visited five narrative realms, each a facet of this cut diamond, and each seamlessly flowing into the other in holistic unity. Yes, this book is truly a diamond, a singular jewel whose seemingly infinite reflections and inflections continually attract and distract like a house of mirrors.

The coast of everything? Everything? Yes, the title is justified. The emphasis should be placed on the word coast of course. Because the most we can hope – or expect – from any true literary product – including the Bible – is to be steered along the coast of the ineffable. Guillermo Stitch manages this challenge masterfully.

Though this book is long, it never ceases to be a page-turner, which makes it a hard book to put down. You constantly want to know what is going to happen next. Moreover, the prose is consistently smooth, melodic and rhythmic…oh…and the language is always fresh. No worn-out English in the “Coast of Everything”.

So, hop on the word train and fasten your seat belt for a journey to places – many places – you have never experienced before. That is a promise.

[David Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a monumental novel of vast and intricate ambition when short, modest novels are the order of the day; a celebration and compendium of narrative and narrative technique, and a defence of the function of narrative in a time when narrative has been extended to all aspects of life and business, and has been questioned for that reason.
Stitch reminds us that narrative's sole function is entertainment, but that its manner of doing so is crucial to its function. He draws heavily on The 1001 Nights - indeed Scheherazade becomes one of his characters, in disguise - to remind us that its function is to postpone - and pacify - Death, but that it has a more vital function still: to keep alive a specific approach to Life, and to Truth.
There was a time, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Western writers envied those dissident writers their sense of danger, because it meant literature mattered, when in the West it was ignored. That sense of danger, jeopardy, is a central theme in this novel, from the opening 'told' story (after the initial 'framing' story), continuing into the later story - ghost-written by the ghost of Charles Dickens (which accounts for its deliberately dated style - I told you it was intricate).
This leads into the structure of the novel - stories within stories.
An inept review in the TLS likened "Coast" to David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", mainly due to its 'nested' make-up - like Russian dolls. It is more complicated, and ambitious, than that. It is better seen as imbricated - with the individual narrative tiles or slates so intricately patterned that none can be removed without upsetting the whole design.
A more apt comparison - and contrast, in length - would be Roberto Bolano's "Antwerp": a densely compacted novella comprising multiple, discrete narratives, narrators, techniques, which has been described as the 'Big Bang' from which all of Bolano's fictional universe originated.
Stitch's novel could be described as one of the possible universes that might result.
Ultimately, the structure and its intricacies - once navigated - are less important than its overall theme and subject - Narrative itself, shape-shifting will-o'-the-wisp, mutating, from fairy tale to hard-boiled noir to futurist dystopia, with double-bluffs and resonant echoes between mutations, ending in a final tour de force when all the narratives condense back into one.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an epic read, Stitch takes the reader deeper into a book than any author has ever done before, through the art of story-telling Stitch explores the boundaries between when one story ends and the next one begins and how they overlap. The way these stories are nested reminded me a lot of the movie Inception, we travel through each story and at some point the next story is started by a character and we delve deeper and deeper until eventually we start to resurface. There is quite a mix of genres included, scifi, detective, dystopia…we even have a bit of Dickens…who did feel more like Bukowski in my opinion.

It is a really innovative book, a unique method of writing, each story easily draws you in…you may have no idea what is going on but with the fantastic characters you happily go along for the ride. Some bits made me chuckle, little throw away comments like after the deepest story ends somebody listening to the story mentions how long that last story was, I was thinking the same thing. Normally in a collection of stories there will be that standout favourite but here the feeling is different, they are separate entities but at the same time they are one…more a collective than a collection.

This is a very very good book, this review doesn’t do it justice, if you like a good story and a puzzle then I very much doubt you will be disappointed by the experience of this adventurous book.

Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2026...

[ian boulton · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a great deal of safe cosy fiction out there, perfect little books with tidy little sentences and familiar little ideas. It makes you wonder where the expansive authors of the past might fit into the current scene. Is there space in this safe little world for Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Joyce, Burgess? Or Guillermo Stitch?

In The Coast Of Everything, excess is part of the point. Too many pages, they'll say. Too many ideas, too many stories. Too many words that are unfamiliar.

Well, sod safety. This is a glorious achievement. It's mad, chaotic, endlessly exciting and stimulating. It's designed to upset, to hurt your head, play with your feelings about stories and their place in your wider philosophy. It throws down a challenge to the reader: have you read enough, thought enough, to get what this novel offers?

Maybe none of us have. Maybe Stitch hasn't.

But if this doesn't spur you on to read more and more widely, to take risks with your own personal culture, then you're welcome to retreat back into your safe little world with its cosy little books. The rest of us will be out scouring the Coast and having a ball.

[Dawn Raffel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will give this long and complex novel a short and simple review: Brilliant. Full of wit and play, dazzlingly original, and as profound as any 21st century literature you're likely to read.

[Liza Achilles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A uniquely creative book. Unlike any book I have ever read. The author gets points for thinking outside the box! I liked the second, third, and fifth stories the best.

[Guillermo Stitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Dizzyingly innovative and wildly ambitious, The Coast of Everything is also a true page-turner—immersive, prescient and moving. Guillermo Stitch is one of my favorite living writers, and all of his talents are on display in this astounding new novel.”
—Christopher Boucher, author of Big Giant Floating Head
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“An immense achievement. The Coast of Everything is an ingenious series of nesting novels, combining the worlds of Dickens, sci-fi, detective noir and The Arabian Nights. It invites us to pull at the threads of narrative superstructure and ask who is really reading and telling us this addictive story.”
—Rónán Hession, author of Ghost Mountain and Leonard and Hungry Paul
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“The Coast of Everything is a genre-shifting, interlocking and overlapping wondrous puzzle of a novel, a book which houses never-ending stories and a never-ending story, which spirals and multiplies and drives its reader through its 747 pages with death-defying nerve and a life-embracing drive. Its structure is not so much ‘boxes within boxes’ as ‘boxes hidden in subterranean tunnels beneath abyssal caverns which lead to labyrinthine corridors which open out into mysterious rooms which in turn contain more boxes.’ And it is, I think, the only book of such length which, once finished, immediately left me with the urge to go back to its first page and begin again.”
—C.D.Rose, author of Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea
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“Guillermo Stitch escorts the reader through lush, Jamesian-paced prose that hums with the echoes of the Russians, the warmth of EM Forster, and the joie de vivre of James Joyce. This is a fabulous landscape: dreamy, concrete, beautifully and fully imagined, and peopled with vivid mavericks. The Coast of Everything is a timeless, extraordinary work.”
—Nuala O’Connor, author of NORA & Seaborne
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“Structurally every bit as innovative and impressive as Ulysses. Stunning… absolutely stunning.”
—David Collard, author of Multiple Joyce

“The fact that there is a writer like Guillermo Stitch defiantly working at these depths when so much feels so shallow turns me around whenever I’m at the point of despair. It’s the only kind of antic disposition committed enough to pierce through. I’ve been lost in The Coast of Everything for months and I’m not sure I’ll ever get out or if I even want to.”
—Professor Luke Kennard, Film & Creative Writing, Univ. of Birmingham, author of Black Bag

“The Coast of Everything is the sort of book that makes you feel simultaneously more intelligent and more illiterate…. Despite its intellectual density, the prose remains agile and pleasurable. Stitch can move effortlessly from gritty noir to Dickensian comedy to postmodern fragmentation without losing tonal control. His sentences are alive with literary memory but rarely paralysed by it. One feels the presence of Borges, Calvino, Pynchon, Barthelme, and Joyce, yet the voice remains distinctively Stitch’s: playful, melancholy, encyclopedic, and slightly feverish. He writes as though every idea reminds him irresistibly of six others…. Lesser metafiction delights in eventually revealing the trick. Stitch is after something stranger and more difficult. The Coast of Everything suggests that stories are not codes to be solved but habitats to be lived inside. The recurring concern is not meaning but continuation…. [O]ne of the most ambitious literary works in recent memory: a maximalist meditation on storytelling, identity, and survival that insists stories matter because life itself depends on them. Scheherazade told stories to her captor to survive another night. Stitch, one suspects, writes for much the same reason.”

—Reggie Chamberlain-King in PopMatters